Chapter X - The Second Protector

We must now go back a little. The first of the so-called Five
Tyrants, or the Five successive Protectors of orthodox China, had
died in 643, his philosopher and friend, Kwan-tsz, having departed
this life a little before him. Their joint title to fame lies in
the fact that “they saved China from becoming a Tartar province,"
and even Confucius admits the truth of this–a most important
factor in enabling us to understand the motive springs of Chinese
policy. Under these circumstances the Duke of Sung, who, as we
have seen, had special moral pretensions to leadership on account
of his being the direct lineal representative of the Shang dynasty
which perished in 1122 B.C., immediately put forward a claim to
the hegemony. He rather prejudiced his reputation, however, by
committing the serious ritual offence of “warring upon Ts’i’s
mourning,” that is, of engaging the allies in hostilities with the
late Protector’s own country whilst his body lay unburied, and his
sons were still wrangling over the question of succession. The
Tartars, however, came to the rescue of, and made a treaty with,
Ts’i–this is only one of innumerable instances which show how the
northern Chinese princes of those early days were in permanent
political touch with the horse-riding nomads. The orthodox Duke of
Sung, dressed in his little brief authority as Protector, had the
temerity to “send for” the ruler of Ts’u to attend his first
durbar. (It must be remembered that the “king” in his own
dominions was only “viscount” in the orthodox peerage of ruling
princes.) The result was that the King unceremoniously took his
would-be protector into custody at the durbar, and put in a claim
to be Protector himself. During the military operations connected
with this political manoeuvre, the Duke of Sung was guilty of the
most ridiculous piece of ritual chivalry; highly approved, it is
true, by the literary pedants of all subsequent ages, but ruinous
to his own worldly cause. The Ts’u army was crossing a difficult
ford, and the Duke’s advisers recommended a prompt attack. “It is
not honourable,” said the Duke, “to take advantage even of an
enemy in distress.” “But,” said his first adviser, “war is war,
and its only object is to punish the foe as severely and promptly
as possible, so as to gain the upper hand, and establish what you
are fighting for.”

Meanwhile important events had been going on in the marquisate of
Tsin, which, during the thirty-five years’ hegemony of Ts’i, had
been engaged in extending its territory in all directions, in
fighting Ts’in, and in annexing bordering Tartar tribes. At its
greatest development Tsin practically comprised all between the
Yellow River in its turns south, east, and north; but, though
probably half its population was Tartar, it never ceased to be
“orthodox” in administrative principle. The energetic but
licentious ruler of Tsin had married a Tartar wife in addition to
his more legitimate spouse (daughter of the late Protector,
Marquess of Ts’i); or, rather, he took two wives, the one being
sister of the other, but the younger sister brought him no
children. Before this he had already married two sisters of quite
a different Tartar tribe, and each of his earlier wives had
brought him a son. His last pair of Tartar lady-loves gained such
a strong hold upon his affections that he was induced by the
mother, being the elder sister of the two, to nominate her own son
as his heir to the exclusion of the three elder brethren, who were
sent on various flimsy pretexts to defend the northern frontiers
against the more hostile Tartars. To complicate matters, the
Marquess’s legitimate or first spouse, the Ts’i princess, besides
bearing a son, had also given him a daughter, who had married the
powerful ruler of Ts’in to the west. Thus not only were Ts’in and
Tsin both half-Tartar in origin and sympathy, but at this period
three out of four of the Tsin possible heirs were actually sons of
Tartar women. The legitimate heir, whose mother was of Ts’i
origin, and, who himself was a man of very high character, ended
the question so far as he was concerned, by committing dutiful
suicide; the three sons by Tartar mothers succeeded to the throne
one after the other, but in the inverse order of their respective
ages. The story of the wanderings of the eldest brother, who did
not come to the throne until he was sixty-two years of age, is one
of the most interesting and romantic episodes in the whole history
of China; and, even with the unfamiliar proper names, would make a
capital romantic novel, so graphically and naturally are some of
the scenes depicted. First he threw himself heart and soul into
Tartar life, joined the rugged horsemen in their internecine wars,
married a Tartar wife, and gave her sister to his most faithful
henchman; then, hearing of the death of the Ts’i premier, Kwan-
tsz, he vowed he would go to Ts’i and try to act as political
adviser in his place. Hospitably received by the Marquess of Ts’i,
he was presented with a charming and sensible Ts’i princess, who
for five years exercised so enervating an influence upon his
virility, ambition, and warlike ardour, that he had to be
surreptitiously smuggled away from the gay Ts’i capital whilst
drunk, by his Tartar father-in-law and by his chief Chinese
henchman and brother-in-law. Then he commenced a series of visits
to the petty orthodox courts which separated Ts’i from Ts’u.
Several of them were rude and neglectful to this unfortunate
prince in distress; but Sung was an exception, for Sung ambition,
as above narrated, had been roughly checked by Ts’u, and Sung now
wished to make overtures to Tsin instead, and to conciliate a
prince who was as likely as not to come to the throne of Tsin. In
637 the prince reached the court of Ts’u, whose ruler had quite
recently begun to take formal and official rank as a “civilized"
federal prince. Meanwhile, news came that his brother (by his own
mother’s younger sister) was dead; this younger brother had taken
refuge in Ts’in during the reign of his youngest brother (the one
born of the last Tartar favourite), and had, after that brother’s
death, been most generously assisted to the throne in turn by the
ruler of Ts’in, on the understanding, however, that Tsin should
cede to Ts’in all territory on the right bank of the Yellow River,
i.e. in the modern province of Shen Si: but the new Tsin ruler had
been persuaded by his courtiers to go back on this humiliating
bargain, in consequence of which war had been declared by Ts’in
upon Tsin, and the faithless ruler of Tsin had been for some time
a prisoner of war in Ts’in; but, regaining his throne through the
influence of his half-sister, the wife of the Ts’in ruler, had
died in harness in 637 B.C. This deceased ruler’s young son was
not popular, and Ts’in was now instrumental in welcoming the
refugee back from Ts’u, and in leading him in triumph, after
nineteen years of adventurous wandering, to his own ancestral
throne; his rival and nephew was killed.

All orthodox China seemed to feel now that the interesting
wanderer, after all his experiences of war, travel, Tartars,
Chinese, barbarians, and politics, was the right man to be
Protector. But it was first necessary for Tsin to defeat Ts’u in a
decisive battle; a war had arisen between Tsin and Ts’u out of an
attempt on the part of CHENG (one of the orthodox Chinese states
that had been uncivil to the wanderer), to drag in the preponderant
power of Ts’u by way of shielding itself from punishment at Tsin’s
hands for past rude behaviour. The Emperor sent his own son to
confer the status of “my uncle” upon him,–which is practically
another way of saying “Protector” to a kinsman,–and in the year
632 accordingly a grand durbar was held, in which the Emperor
himself took part. The Tsin ruler, who had summoned the durbar,
and had even “commanded the presence” of the Emperor, was the
guiding spirit of the meeting in every respect, except in the nominal
and ritualistic aspect of it; nevertheless, he was prudent and careful
enough scrupulously to observe all external marks of deference,
and to make it appear that he was merely acting as mouthpiece to
the puppet Emperor; he even went the length of dutifully offering
to the Emperor some Ts’u prisoners, and the Emperor in turn “graciously
ceded” to Tsin the imperial possessions north of the Yellow River.
Thus Ts’in and Tsin each in turn clipped the wings of the Autocrat
of All the Chinas, so styled.

During these few unsettled years between the death of the first
real Protector in 643 and the formal nomination by the Emperor of
the second in 632, Ts’u and Sung had, as we have seen, both
attempted to assert their rival claims. A triangular war had also
been going on for some time between Ts’i and Ts’u, the bone of
contention being some territory of which Ts’i had stripped Lu; and
there was war also between Tsin and Ts’i, Tsin and Ts’in, and Tsin
and Ts’u, which latter state always tried to secure the assistance
of Ts’in when possible. From first to last, there never was,
during the period covered by Confucius’ history, any serious war
between Tartar Ts’in and barbarian Ts’u; rather were they natural
allies against orthodox China, upon which intermediate territory
they both learned to fix covetous eyes.

The situation is too involved, in view of the uncouthness of
strange names and the absence of definite frontiers–changing as
they did with the result of each few years’ campaigning–to make
it possible to give a full, or even approximately intelligible,
explanation of each move. But the following main features are
incontestable:–Ts’in, Tsin, Ts’i, and Ts’u were growing,
progressive, and aggressive states, all of them strongly tinged
with foreign blood, which foreign blood was naturally assimilated
the more readily in proportion to the power, wealth, and culture
of the assimilating orthodox nucleus. The imperial domain was an
extinct political volcano, belching occasional fumes of
threatening, sometimes noxious, but not ever fatally suffocating
smoke, always without fire. “The Hia,” that is, the federation of
princes belonging to pure Hia, or (as we now say) “Chinese” stock,
were evidently unwarlike in proportion to the absence of foreign
blood in their veins; but they were all of them equally
ruses, and all of them past-masters in casuistic diplomacy.
Trade, agriculture, literature, and even law, were now quite
active, and (as we shall gradually see in these short Chapters)
China was undoubtedly beginning to move, as, after 2500 years of a
second “ritual” sleep, she is again now moving, at the beginning
of the twentieth century A.D.